Im not sure if that article from persons at Uni. of Maine USA is apropriate here. Its not a specialist subject of mine but when I did ecology not so long ago we were taught that bird populations shrank and grew in relation to available food primarily...and if you read the anti-cat article carefully its thrust is built up by a lot of 'may influence'and so forth. Well ...pigs may fly...thats not scientific fact but opinion.
Obviously its not a good idea to let domestic cats become feral colonies...that seems to be what its about...a problem somewhere in the usa?
Predators will kill a lot of birds...from the instinct to eat... which is rather less surprising than that human beings killed a couple of hundred million of their own species in the last century (although,nb, that hasnt endangered H.sapiens). Its certainly bloody in the natural world but, given that fact, theres no proof there (it seems to me) that cats are actually endangering species in the UK...and thus on to some need for them to wear bells, be kept indoors, and so forth.
If someone would like to scientifically prove it fine. Ive just cleared up a thrush I was looking at yesterday and Im certainly open to it. We need to hear that cats actually ARE threatening the survival of UK species... rather than killing lots of individual birds.
The simple argument for fairly lean, bell-less, working cats is were never more than a few feet from a rat!
Returning to earlier in the thread its sad to dislike both frogs and spiders as they are both such useful insect predators (especially where I live as they both save a lot of mosquito bites!). I think its quite easy to decondition yourself to superficial dislikes. I had some dislike of spiders learned off my mum but knowing they did nothing but good I determined to coexist and laid a bit of string from the bath tap as a ladder. Just that simple bit of positive action led me to realise we could easily co-exist and after a few years I became an arachnophile to the extent I now cull the pholsids...which are the long legged net-vibrating ones which kill the other spiders. It should be possible to make a damp far away froggy place...to keep them away from you...and so get to co-exist and hopefully to eventually like them?
PS The frog pic took sometime to download on my system...its lovely!
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